‘Luck’ and consequences: stories by Wellfleet poet Ed Meek

Friday

Apr 28, 2017 at 10:14 AM

By Tal Zamir Banner Correspondent

Fortune does not favor the brave, the wise or the deserving. Or at least that’s the case in the auspiciously titled “Luck,” a collection of short stories by Wellfleet poet Ed Meek, which was published this month by Tailwinds Press. The world depicted in these stories feels more real than fictional — the characters shift through their lives at random, their actions and intentions becoming minor things, almost weightless. Most of them live in or are from New England, but that is no accident.

“The poet Richard Hugo talks about what he calls the ‘triggering town,’” Meek says. “It is a place that serves as a basis for a poem. That concept can also apply to a story. Of course, place, or where we are from, plays a significant role in who we are, and that’s true of the characters in stories. I’m from Quincy and Milton, Mass., but I’ve lived in Iran and New Hampshire and Montana and many other places in the U.S.”

The people in his stories inhabit these places as if they were worn coats, things that provide comfort mixed with world-weariness. “The Fall of Iran,” for example, centers on a character who works as a teacher in Tehran just as the city is being consumed by revolution. He knows that it is forbidden to export a certain type of Persian rug, that fender-benders are communal spectacles, that opium is readily available and absurdly inexpensive — provocative details that are relayed with nonchalance.

“I lived in Iran from 1977 to 1979 at the time of the Iranian Revolution,” Meek says. “I taught at an international school in Tehran and lived in a village just north of the city. I was sympathetic with the Iranian people who wanted to overthrow the shah. Just after I arrived in 1977, there was a student riot and it became obvious over the next year-and-a-half that the revolution would succeed. ... I was caught in a few dangerous situations that I refer to in one of the stories, but overall, the Iranian people remained friendly right up until the day I left on an Air Force evacuation plane.”

Perhaps because Meek draws from personal experience, his collection favors the first-person voice.

“When you use the first person in a story it enables you to see the world from that character’s perspective,” he says. “Writing fiction is almost like acting, assuming personas.”

Some of the first-person narrators in “Luck” are not all that likable. This is especially true when the narrator appears to be unaware of his own ethical lapses, as does the protagonist in “The Fall of Iran.” Indeed, many of Meek’s characters have blind spots in their field of moral vision.

Time seems to be at issue in Meek’s stories. Some of his characters are simply too old to be excused for their irresponsible behavior, and in other instances, events in the story happen so quickly that there is no time for them to contemplate the significance of their actions. In some stories, both factors are at play.

Take, for example, “Kick-Boxing with Ingrid,” in which a professor has an extramarital affair with a student. The affair occurs over the course of a few days, just as the professor starts to show symptoms of Guillain-Barré syndrome. In that span of time, he barely has the opportunity to evaluate his actions, or the emotional toll that they take on his loved ones. He cares only that the student does not become pregnant, and that he does not contract HIV. The point from which the story is told is so close to the point at which the actions occur, there’s no time for reflection or judgment.

Fiction is in some ways a conservative art form — readers expect epiphanies and moral resolution. Meek’s stories do not go that distance, and as a result, they almost don’t feel like fiction. Their truth is that of luck — and misfortune.